Think About The Way VII

By Doctor Gonzo 

3 September 1999

Minneapolis — My ever-faithful stereo (which is starting to show signs of its two-year age) has a three-CD changer. I have 80 CDs, which means that (TI-85 alert!) there are 82.160 different combinations of CDs that can be in the stereo at any given time. And though I have probably not yet tried all of those combinations, I have done many of them: Van Morrison, U2, Green Day, KQRS, Smashing Pumpkins . . . a wide variety of music graces my archives, and thus my stereo from time to time. My moods and the season usually define what I am listening to at any given time; every album I have is associate with a certain time span and mental state.

It would seem that with all the music I have to choose from, it would be rare for me to repeat any combinations. And that is usually true, though there are times when I fall back to my base. The most obvious example, and the one with most relevance right now, is how every single time I find myself up a creek without a paddle, all CDs in my stereo are replaced with various Led Zeppelin albums. One of them is going to be Led Zeppelin IV, to boot, but even if we ignore that certainty, crunching the numbers tells us that there is a 0,68% chance that, at any given time, all three CDs will be Led Zeppelin.

Well, shit. If only 0,68% of my time is spent with me in dire straits (about 10 minutes of every day, it turns out), what am I to complain about? A good deal less than 1%. But I am in that state right now, and Led Zeppelin IV, Presence, and In Through The Out Door are all waiting for their turn to have their digitally-encoded bits converted to sine waves and then to Robert Plant belting out Black Dog.

I just got through listening to Royal Orléans, and that means Nobody's Fault But Mine is up next. Perfect. Get it on. It is nobody's fault but mine, so why balk at wallowing in self-martyrdom? Why, indeed. Actually, I am not even sure that I am in dire straits. Just a feeling of Fear and Loathing, come up out of nowhere, that has hit me like a crackback block in front of 50.000 screaming fans on a Sunday afternoon. Total paralysis.

The winds of Thor blow quite cold on this night, and that very much has to do with this. A chilly night, one that is reminding me of the fact that fall is just around the corner, and with that . . . who knows? Autumn has always had a very special place in my heart, the reverse of spring: every year at the end of winter, I get all antsy and semi-manic, waiting for spring to come. I look forward to it every year, things getting all lively again, hoping that fortune will smile upon me, and every year it is the same. I get stomped and beaten like a gong come 'round April. It's fairly consistent. Fall, on the other hand, I usually regard with a feeling of dread. But fall seems to be where I am at my best, when luck is on my side, and things get better before they get worse.

So that is the angst I feel. I have noticed that a lot of genuinely bizarre signs seem to predict my fate. Even something as stupid as pictures rotating around a bulletin board has some psychic connection with my life, in ways I will not even try to figure out. But just because you don't understand something doesn't mean you shouldn't listen to it, and the fool who waits until he understands the destination before he hops on the train is going to be stuck in the station for a long time.

I have been on both sides of the fence, but by and large 'tis far better to see first and ask questions later than it is to smack yourself upside the head after the fact and say, "Gee, I should have seen that coming!" Even the I Ching, before it blew the big one, had an accuracy of 100%. Never failed, and the reasons for that I will never try to comprehend. Even when it did suck wind and point due north when things were heading south, in retrospect it seems that its error was due to some kind of unholy alliance between the proprietors of Sebastian Joe's and the gimps that sulk around Lake Calhoun looking for symmetric architecture.

"Never fuck with a friend's head by accident. And if their private trips get out of control now and then — well, you do what has to be done."
        —Hunter Thompson

Herr Doktor Thompson has filed away many a nugget of wisdom. From time to time I have disagreed with some of the things he has said, but they are minor transgressions, and most of the time I see that I am the one in the wrong. But I have never disagreed with the concept of Gonzo Journalism, and with it, how it translates to living a genuinely strange and savage life.

One of the most bizarre things to understand, however, and this is something that I have only recently come to see, is that Gonzo is the antidote to weird living. People's trips do get out of control from time to time, and rarely is the fallout limited to themselves. I can trace most of my stress to people who went on a wild trip, away from the cold, sharp edges of this reality, and concocted a world out of soft, mushy logic. Fine for lounging around in from time to time, yes, but when I need to deal with anything more serious than what colour socks to wear in the morning, I tend to go for this world. The more significant the question, the less patience I have for rationalization, denial, and ignorance.

These realities are the truly weird ones, not the realities that are created from Gonzo living. Those who are not accustomed to honesty find Gonzo a strange and terrible saga; but how can it be any different? We are not a culture full of truth lovers, and a generation that has been more than ever weaned on the slick, faux worlds of Madison Avenue and plastic (not to mention good old Catholic Guilt, a subset) is not going to find anything normal about the aggressive search for honesty. The truth will make you odd, but that is only because it is as rare as finding a diamond among the dandelions of the East River Flats nowadays.

There are some people who believe that going around and laying a sincere stomp and whipsong on the general population is a pretty shite thing to do. These people are right. But if ignorance is bliss, and it truly is, what about those of us who can't even feign ignorance, let alone put a bag over our collective heads and scream Spice Girls songs to drown out reality? Just because a roll of the tumbling dice granted us that special sixth sense, are we to suffer endlessly the slings and arrows of people's bad acid trips?

Well, seeing as I managed to cram at least four literary and/or musical references into that last sentence, the answer is obviously yes. For our weird acid trips are just as strange as those of others, and truth is all relative, right? Upon reading this, I see I must jump off this weird thread before it blows up in my face . . .

"Aw, Mama, can this really . . . be . . . the . . . end?"
      —Bob Dylan

Cyclical year 1999 is just about over now, and it is ending as much on the same weird quasi-down note as it ended on a weird quasi-up note a year ago. My two-year cycle theory of Qi is as useful now as it ever was. This theory has never been explained in any public print, so far as I know, probably because I am the only person I know of to subscribe to this theory. I created it through a great amount of research into personal experience, trying to find the things that were in common among the threads of fate.

Which is irrelevant to 99% of people out there. It really doesn't matter, or bother me that much, however. I tell everybody I know that 90% of what I say should probably be ignored, that I am just randomly throwing regurgitated thoughts together and seeing what kind of post-modern sentence comes out. Usually, it is nothing more than a corner I can talk my way into but not out of, and it sputters to an end. Once in a while, however, I do seem to stumble upon a genuinely good thought. It usually comes from some crazy scene that makes me think straight for a brief sentence, and it is easy to tell afterward what is good and what is not. Qi is not.

What is? Ah, but a preface: cyclical 1999 was as bizarre a year as I have ever had. "Bizarre" is not even the word that best describes it; the word does not exist. A year in which I didn't do a single thing I really regret, but a year I wouldn't repeat. If I were thrust back to September 1998 and started over from there, I wouldn't change a note. But if September 1999 started out the same way, I would turn tail and run.

When words like "good" and "bad" fail, it indicates the presence of many levels. There was a hell of a lot of good, and a hell of a lot of bad. But it goes far beyond that, to value systems, roles, the very "human" condition. Things that words such as "good" and "bad" can't be used to describe, because those words come out of these abstract thoughts. In some twisted way, the human condition defines what is good and bad, not vice versa. It hits on a level that is both above and below conventional thinking, a swift pincer move that soon has you within its grasp.

Suddenly, terms that people believe they are familiar with are reversed, much like the art of Gonzo. Crazy and sane, right and wrong; the beliefs and tendencies that are attached to these dualistic words vibrate rapidly back and forth, quickly, until you are absolutely turned around as to what is right and what is wrong, and can it be relative? With the walls spinning so rapidly, it is hard to move. But here and there, a glimpse, right down the center, of a stable line that doesn't seem to be moving.

Siddhartha Gautama, the Buddha, talked about "The Middle Path." The middle path does not necessarily mean compromise. It does not mean going between two opposites and merely splitting the difference. The closest person to Buddha today, Bill Watterson, pretty much said it all through his mouthpiece Calvin: A good compromise makes everybody unhappy. But aside from that, there is not hard-and-fast rule to determine where to go. That line seems stable, but it flits in and out of reality. Change your viewpoint a few degrees, and it moves, much like the images on some cheap plastic toy. Good luck.

"So long, Marianne . . ."

There are many ways to play the game. The one that the criminally insane use is to believe that as long as you keep the small rules, you can break the big ones; obey the speed limit, and your murders will go unpunished. This works well, until you realize that being a criminal is not as much fun as you think. I used this for a while myself, and work it did, until I became a pariah. To go back to the opposite, breaking the small ones while following the important rules, is out of the question. It smacks of repressed religious guilt, of an inane "cleverness" that poor fools associate with getting away with something petty. But then again, following all the rules (the old Good German syndrome) is a joke, and running amok is a pretty ridiculous trip as well.

Only thing left is to forget about big and small and concentrate on what is pointless. Break the pointless rules, and follow the real ones, hidden among the landscape like gold nuggets.